So #Heartbleed, perhaps the best software bug ever. I spent much of today checking websites and changing passwords. Fortunately, I use the Firefox password manager to store mine and sync them with the browser on my mobile phone, so I could open it, search for “https://”, and work through the list. I eventually used 30…
Read More Many password. So changing. Much heartbleedSomething we’ve needed for a while: a good hard stomp on the knuckles of all this MAGIC FACEBOOK DRONEZ FOR AFRICA nonsense. Provided. I especially like the point that in fact, mobile operators are building 3G coverage in these places right now using the exciting new technology of sticking the antenna on a pole. A…
Read More Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in moneyThis is only one of the reasons why squatting in other people’s netblocks is a bad idea. To understand the point, you’ve got to go back to the BT 21CN project, which was one of those “the Internet is just another service over our private network” ideas telcos tend to love. Although a lot of…
Read More daft IP addressing choicesI think it is probably important to direct attention to this post, which contains the only convincing explanation of PRISM I’ve yet seen, including the tiny budget (if it only cost $20m to process everything in Apple, Google, Facebook etc, what do they need all those data centres for), the overt denials, and the denial…
Read More PRISM. Sometimes it’s easier to solve these things in LA case of China exporting its internal chaos, as Jamie Kenny would say; I was recently talking to someone who had installed a wireless broadband network in China, and they mentioned that they’d had an exciting experience with a Huawei router. Politicians whose constituents include Huawei’s competitors are endlessly insinuating that their equipment is always…
Read More internal chaos, exportedSo, that PCCSpoil blog. To begin with, it was a collection of spoiled ballots from the police commissioner elections, a large (>75%) proportion of which seemed to add the hashtags #PCCSpoil or #policespoilballot. I had the impression that this suggested a campaign of some sort. After all, why the hashtag if you weren’t planning to…
Read More Going round the country, stirring up apathyVia someone on twatter, Parliament debates telecoms regulation, in 1895. The superficial bit: there was a great distinction between telephones and such subjects as gas and water. Gas and water were necessaries for every inhabitant of the country; telephones were not and never would be. It was no use trying to persuade themselves that the…
Read More How the Scottish Labour party got telecoms policy right in 1895Remember that thumbsucker I did on the Great Firewall? Well, here’s some data, via this post (thanks, Jamie). It seems that Fang Binxing, China’s Chief Bellhead, boss of the Beijing University of Post & Telecoms, and king of the great firewall, really is in trouble due to his special relationship with Bo Xilai. He briefly…
Read More not at all defangedWell, this is interesting, both on the Bo Xilai story and also on the general theme of the state of the art in contemporary authoritarianism. It looks like a major part of the case is about BXL’s electronic surveillance of Chongqing and specifically of top national-level Chinese officials: One political analyst with senior-level ties, citing…
Read More Canalising the marshes: tidying up the peopleSo, why did we get here? Back in the mists of time, in the US Bell System, there used to be something called a Business Office, by contrast to a Central Office (i.e. what we call a BT Local Exchange in the UK), whose features and functions were set down in numerous Bell System Practice…
Read More The politics of call centres, part two: sources of failure